1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a canceration information providing method and a canceration information providing device for analyzing cells and providing information related to canceration of the cells.
2. Description of the Related Art
An analyzer for automatically analyzing the cells of a subject and providing information related to the canceration of the cells is known (see e.g., U.S. Patent Application publication No. 2008/108103). U.S. Patent Application publication No. 2008/108103 discloses a device that flows a measurement specimen including cells collected from a subject to a flow cell, irradiates the measurement specimen flowing through the flow cell with light to acquire a scattered light signal for the individual cell, extracts a characteristic parameter by analyzing the waveform of each scattered light signal, and discriminates cancer/atypical cell from a plurality of cells using the characteristic parameter.
For example, in the tissue diagnosis of the uterine cervix, the process from the normal state to cancer has a plurality of stages, “Normal”, “CIN1”, “CIN2”, “CIN3”, and “Cancer” in order from the normal state. “CIN1” is a state in which the atypical cells are growing in one third from a basal layer to a surface layer, and is a state in which the possibility of regressing spontaneously is high. Thus, treatment is determined as unnecessary in “CIN1”. “CIN2” is a state in which the atypical cells are growing in two thirds from the basal layer to the surface layer. “CIN3” is a state in which the atypical cells are growing substantially entirely from the basal layer to the surface layer. Treatment is sometimes determined as necessary in “CIN2” and “CIN3”. If the state of “CIN3” further advances, this results in “Cancer”. When reaching “Cancer”, immediate treatment is particularly necessary, and it is very important that this state is reliably detected.
The analyzer described in U.S. Patent Application publication No. 2008/108103 has a problem in that “CIN1” in which treatment is unnecessary is determined as “Cancer”, or so-called false alarm increases when trying to reliably detect “Cancer” since the atypical cells also exist in the “CIN1”. When attempting to reduce such false alarm, it may become difficult to reliably detect “Cancer”.